I found all these things

I found all these things, all these pictures, essays, poems written and notes scribbled, from years past to days ago. They’ve been buried and overlooked while my handwriting changed form and shape across the years, they’ve waited in past while I learned new lessons, but now they’re in a box by my bed, neatly organized into folders and stacks of thought. Five years, all here. These are my thoughts and this is my development as a human being from immaturity to insight. Has a lot changed?

Each essay, each picture I pick up and analyze has a distinct wave of memories tied to it -- a conglomeration of a wave of dysphoric emotion. These years, what happened? The contact proof sheets from photography bring memories of intense physical pain and pill-popping logs, of sunny, nostalgic days and ultimate peacefulness in the darkroom. They bring me memories of Coldplay on my blue CD player and developer chemicals on my hands. I stayed in that darkroom for hours at a time, and I remember nothing else from 9th grade than rolling up my sleeves and clicking exposure times. I’ll try to fix you, fix you.

The essay from 10th grade in neat, quaint, stoic writing evokes the translucent purple water bottle. 2 liters a day. 3 diet pills a day. White unknown substance. Hope in chemicals.

The frantic, knowing scribbles from 11th show what it was like to be buried in literacy, in minute societal observation and elusive connection. It was a time of brilliance, of insanity, of sitting on curbs and hiding prescription pills in gloves. I’ll look back on this spot, I thought, as I slipped another pill into a woolen finger. The sun was also shining and my high-tops tap tapped to the rhythm of academic delinquency, oddly rebellious and appropriately out of place. Tap, tap.
It’s all here. Calorie counting, modeling agency names. Observations and metaphors jotted down on lined paper and forgotten.

And years from now, with my college diploma in hand, will I really look at this box again, fold back its flimsy cardboard sleeves, and feel the memories of a distant teenage past? It’s where I came from. This was me. These were my thoughts, hopes, dreams, preoccupations. In a box. I’ve never wanted to be boxed. So this is irony, tickling me its final goodbye.